Let's get right to the point. Ultimately, heaven or hell will be our final destiny--yours and mine--and I have zero desire for either one of us to feel the flames. But the truth of the matter is, unless we know Jesus as our Lord and Redeemer, the only thing awaiting our souls on the other side of death is the undying heat of God's just wrath. Bottom line: either Christ delivers us from the fiery consequences of our personal sinfulness or we burn forever, period. That's neither a threat nor a scare tactic, just a horrible fact we all must take seriously.

Jesus has quite a lot to say about hell and none of it is good. You'd think He would major on the blessings of salvation since He is the Savior and, of course, He does. Yet, He makes certain that those who hear His voice understand the terrible result of not embracing Him wholeheartedly. I could cite over twenty verses in the Bible (never pulling a single one out of context, by the way) where Christ talks about damnation in the most frightening of terms. He employs phrases like "everlasting fire," "furnace of fire," "the fire that never shall be quenched," and "where the worm dieth not" to illustrate the horrors of an eternity spent outside the scope of salvation. Hell is not a pleasant place; you don't want to go there.

To get an accurate idea of what it's really all about, turn to Matthew 13: 36-43, in the New Testament. Those verses read as follows:

• 36: Then he left the multitudes, and went into the house: and his disciples came unto him, saying, Explain unto us the parable of the tares of the field.
• 37: And he answered and said, He that soweth the good seed is the Son of man;
• 38: and the field is the world; and the good seed, these are the sons of the kingdom; and the tares are the sons of the evil [one];
• 39: and the enemy that sowed them is the devil: and the harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are angels.
• 40: As therefore the tares are gathered up and burned with fire; so shall it be in the end of the world.
• 41: The Son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that cause stumbling, and them that do iniquity,
• 42: and shall cast them into the furnace of fire: there shall be the weeping and the gnashing of teeth.
• 43: Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father. He that hath ears, let him hear.

Now, the things I'm going to emphasize from the biblical text above are blatantly obvious, the kind of stuff so conspicuous you'll know right off I'm not twisting the Scriptures to a personal theological agenda.

First of all, Jesus is explaining the parable He told previously in verses 24 through 30 of the same chapter. He's responding to the wise request of His disciples for clarification on some teaching they didn't quite understand. In the course of his explanation Christ emphasizes the fact that there are two types of people on this planet: the wheat and the tares, or the sons of the kingdom and the sons of the evil (one). When the end of the world comes the sons of the kingdom shall shine forth as the sun, but the tares shall be cast into the furnace of fire. The question I'm forced to ask myself and the question you had sure better ask yourself is pretty straightforward, "Am I wheat, or am I a child of the evil one?" There's no middle ground here; we're one or the other.

Second, Christ uses figurative language to graphically portray a literal location. He calls hell a furnace of fire. The picture is totally universal, applicable to anyone's imagination. Whatever shape our mind gives to the word "furnace" it will invariably be a place of horrific conflagration. This is precisely the idea Christ intends to get across. He wants you and I to vividly imagine an inescapable inferno into which we'll be thrown should we be numbered amongst the tares. The physical reality of hell, however, becomes manifestly evident when Jesus talks of actual men and women being tossed to the flames wherein there'll be "weeping and gnashing of teeth."

Recall the absolute worst misery you've ever known in your entire life and realize it's nothing but a cake-walk compared to the torments being described by Christ.

Finally, Jesus identifies the recipients of the Father's retribution as men and women who "do iniquity." In other words they are irreparably depraved and permanently consumed by the vile passions of their own wicked nature. Interestingly enough, Christians are sinful, too. The sole distinction between them and the doers of iniquity lies strictly in the prerogative of God's only begotten Son. The good news of the Gospel is that Jesus choses to save His people from the power as well as the penalty of natural corruption. Certainly Christians sin--sometimes unbelievably--but Christ delivers His elect from the tyrannical love of sinning. They truly abhor their transgressions and find great comfort in the freedom of life-changing repentance derived from obedient submission to His lordship. The Christian becomes progressively Christ-like, whereas the unbeliever becomes increasingly devilish. In the case of our text, the tares have no genuine relationship with the Savior and thus no salvation. Though they may look like wheat by virtue of religion or moral reform, the resemblance is merely an external facade. A tare will often fool himself, other men, even the Church, but he (or she) can't fool God. On Judgment Day, every tare without exception will be separated from the wheat and committed to well deserved non-stop perdition.

Incidentally, if you think I'm pushing the longevity of judgment a little too hard, study Matthew 25:31-46. Various theologians play a variety of semantic games with the plain message of nearly every passage in the Book, but there's no exegetically honest way of circumventing this one. In verse 46 "everlasting torment" means the anguish lasts continuously without termination. The original Greek allows for no alternative interpretation.

The possibility of winding up in hell scares me tremendously. That's exactly what each warning related to the subject is suppose to accomplish and, frankly, I hope you're seriously disturbed by the thought also. So, how do we avoid the furnace? Christ says to His disciples, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life: no one cometh unto the Father, but by me (John 14:6)" Coming to the Father in the specific sense to which Jesus refers is to be received by God in heaven and to live joyfully in His presence moment by moment without end. But Christ alone is the Way.

Ironically, if we reject Jesus, we'll still meet the Father one day--and we'll wish we hadn't.

I'm figuring you have a decision to make; I've already made mine.

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